A COMMEMORAT10N
Frances Hodgkins' Works
1929 - 1946
Still Life with Red Jar (e1933), Watere%ur
759.
993
HOD
22 November 1997 - 25 January 1998
Robert McDougall Art Gallery
Botanic Gardens Christchurch
lntroduction
]i~!~ii~ll~i~~il'L
C01298072
Farmyard (c.1940j, Gouache
The fiftieth anniversary of the British Council, and its link with New Zealand, has been the inspiration to also commemorate the
death of New Zealand's perhaps most celebrated expatriate artist, Frances Hodgkins, who died on 13 May 1947. In recognition
of this anniversary, the British Council has made available on loan eight works by Frances Hodgkins from its collection and two
from the British Government Art Collection. These works, which are touring public galleries throughout New Zealand during
1997, comprise this exhibition, supplemented by many selected from the Robert McDougall Art Gallery collection.
When Frances Hodgkins died in Dorset in 1947, she left a legacy of artistic achievement that was still largely unrecognised in
the country of her birth. At that time, she was poorly represented in public collections around New Zealand. What works were
held mostly dated from before 1920; there was almost nothing from the last two decades of her life. Few New Zealanders knew
how well she was regarded by contemporary British artists.
In Christchurch in 1947, she was totally unrepresented in either the Robert McDougall Art Gallery or Canterbury Society of
Arts collections. Yet when attempts were made early in 1948 to secure the watercolour Pleasure Garden for the city collection
there was fierce opposition to the acquisition from the conservative anti-modern-art lobby, despite the fact that the recognition
Frances Hodgkins had achieved within the International Modern movement had not been accomplished by any other New
Zealand artist of her generation. The debate that ensued developed into a row that is today a landmark in the annals of New
Zealand art history.
The focus of this exhibition is on the last seventeen years of Frances Hodgkins' artistic activity, from 1929 to 1946, a period
that is considered the most important in her career. During the 1920s, '30s and '40s, Frances Hodgkins became highly experimental
in her work. She was undoubtedly influenced by modern masters such as Braque, Picasso, Matisse and Duty in the development
of her own calligraphic style. Although much has been written in the last two decades about Frances Hodgkins and her work,
the question of the level of her individuality as an artist has still to be determined.
What is not in doubt is that she made a significant contribution to British art. More than any other expatriate New Zealand
artist, Hodgkins demonstrated that not only did British artists contribute to New Zealand's artistic development but that New
Zealand artists were capable of reciprocal influence.
The Robert McDougall Art Gallery is indebted to the British Council and the British High Commission for the loan of works
by Frances Hodgkins that have not been seen publicly in New Zealand before.
Neil Roberts
Frances Hodgkins
her works between 1929 and 1946
Frances Hodgkins was born in Dunedin in 1869 to William Mathew
and Isabel Hodgkins. After local training in art, she left New Zealand
for Europe in 1901. Despite two return visits in 1903 and 1913, she
chose to live a peripatetic existence overseas.
Although based in England, she visited the Continent regularly, and
France in particular. It was as a result of living in Paris in 1911 that
she began to absorb something of the Modern movement.
In the 1920s, Frances Hodgkins entered a new and highly
experimental phase in her career as an artist. By the late 1920s, the
figurative subjects that had always been so dominant in her work
began to diminish, though they still held some significance. Among
Sabrina's Garden (7932), Pencil
the portraits in pencil from this time was Boy in the Wood (cat.
no.1), which was related to another work in oil with the same title. Increasingly, the departure from the figurative led to more
interest in still life or landscape, or combinations of both, which emerged as the principal motif to hold her interest in the
decades that followed.
The alignment of her work with contemporary British art was such that early in 1929 she was proposed for membership of
the Seven and Five Society. This group, founded in 1919 as an exhibiting society, had set out to provide alternative opportunities
for young artists to show their work. The 1929 Seven and Five group included among its twenty-one members lvon Hitchens,
Cedric Morris, Christopher Wood, Ben Nicholson and expatriate New Zealander Len Lye.
Whilst all the group's artists still held to the objectivity of the real world, freedom of expression was perceived to be
paramount. Common to each of them was an interest in naturalistic subjects, particularly still life and the landscape. But
eventually, the group's ideas moved in a more non-representational direction with which Frances Hodgkins did not feel
comfortable.
Always in financial straits, Frances Hodgkins had some hope of relief early in 1930 when London art dealer Arthur Howell,
who ran St George's Gallery, offered her a contract that promised a measure of security for some time. In the exhibition she held
at St George's Gallery that year, her departure from the figurative was evident as the works were mostly still life or still life set
against the landscape. The pictorial space had also become substantially flattened, denying traditional spatial concerns with
interior and exterior often merging into a continuous space. Such work was the consolidation of a decade of experimentation.
In the early 1930s, Frances Hodgkins explored a variety of still life objects as subjects including, as well as flowers and fruit,
fish and shells as in Fish (cat. no.2) and Still Life, Fishes and Shells (cat. no.6). Much inspiration during this time also came from
the landscape, particularly that of England, Wales and Spain. When in 1932 the St George's Gallery failed, Frances Hodgkins
signed a contract with the Lefevre Gallery, which was to remain her principal agent for many years.
In the summer of 1932, she holidayed with friends at Bridgnorth, Shropshire, on the river Severn. The result of this visit was a
number of paintings, watercolours and drawings, including Sabrina's Garden (cat. no.3) and Pleasure Garden. Also in 1932, Frances
Hodgkins received an invitation to join the avant-garde Unit One group and accepted. However, the following year she resigned as
she did not support the group's non-objective philosophy and its leaning towards abstraction. A decision in 1934 to resign from the
Seven and Five group was made for a similar reason.
During the period from 1934 to 1936, Frances
Hodgkins was based in London but made visits to Tossa
de Mar near Barcelona in Spain in 1935 and 1936. At
this time, she expanded her interest in the landscape
and its possibilities in combinations with still life and
experimented with gouache as a medium.
The painting The Return of the River (cat. no.lO)
dates from this period. It reveals an interest in
geometricising landscape elements, creating many
angular distortions that give rise to some spatial
ambiguity. It is thought that this may have been a
direct response to Picasso, whose work had greatly
- impressed Hodgkins at an exhibition in Barcelona. On
15 February 1936 she wrote, 'I was lucky enough to
see the Picasso show. .. a most purifying experience.
All my energy was torn from me:
From May 1937 until 1939, Frances Hodgkins
lived at Worth Matravers near Corfe Castle. There she
used a cowshed as a studio and she also frequently
stayed with friends on a farm in Wiltshire. It was in Still Life - Zipp (7945), Oil on Canvas
this environment that she developed her interest in farmyard subjects. The objects of the farmyard gave her inspiration for a
number of paintings, including Tanks, Barrels and Drums (cat. no.l1). In this work she moved further in the direction of abstraction
than she had hitherto, arriving at a new approach to the object in the landscape.
At the end of 1936 she had been invited by Contemporary Lithographs Limited to make a lithograph as part of a contemporary
artist series. The work Arrangement ofJugs (cat. no.12) was the result, although it was not published until 1938.lt was based on
a watercolour with a similar title. The artist John Piper assisted her in making the lithographs and, as a result, she became firm
friends with him and his wife, Myfanwy Evans.
By the late 1930s, her interest in random objects in the landscape had increased. Arrangements that occurred· by ~hance
rather than by decision or as a result of selection appealed more and more and can be found in a work such as Houses and
Outhouses Purbeck (cat. no.13) where the rubbish accumulated around buildings on a south Dorset farm forms an important
focus as the motif in the painting.
After 1939, Frances Hodgkins was unable to travel abroad because of war conditions and she made Corfe Castle her home.
There she made a studio in a former Methodist chapel. In 1940 her work was, however, exhibited beyond Britain, being shown
at the Venice Biennale and the New Zealand Centennial Exhibition.
Her interest in random discarded objects expanded to include disused farming implements and machinery of the rural
community and these replaced selected still life as a principal motif. Rather than an object being posed against the landscape,
as it was a decade earlier, it was now presented as being naturally a part of the landscape. This lifting of the common object and
giving it a new identity bordered on the romantic. The wheel was a motif that regularly appeared in both Frances Hodgkins'
painting and also in the works of a number of British artists at this time. It was while she was staying with John Piper and his
wife that she discovered a farm with a yard full of agricultural junk that became the inspiration for another set of farm object
.
paintings, including Farmyard (cat. no.16).
By 1944 Frances Hodgkins was feeling the effects of war conditions: the stressful sound of planes constantly overhead, the
need to shelter from bombing raids and having strangers billeted into her home. All this greatly upset the 76-year-old artist.
Among the works that she made in 1945 was Still Life - Zipp (cat. nO.17), which continued a theme that she had explored in
earlier paintings in which there was a merging of self-portrait and still life, the motif becoming a symbolic representation of
both. Unlike the 1935 Self-Portrait - Still Life and Self-Portraitand the 1940/41 Still Life with a Red Beret, the mood of Still Life
- Zipp expresses her personal trauma and the dark shadow that the effects of war had cast over her life.
Frances Hodgkins continued to paint until 1946. Among her last works is the gouache To the Castle Corfe (cat. no.18) that,
in common with several other paintings of this time, has the bridge and river as the principal subject focus.
In November 1946, Lefevre Gallery in London held a large retrospective exhibition but by then Frances Hodgkins had ceased
to paint. By early 1947 she had become increasingly unwell and unable to care for herself. During March, while staying at the
Greyhound Inn in Corfe Castle village, she Degan having hallucinations and her screams throughout the night eventually led to
her being certified insane. Her last weeks were spent at the Herrison House Psychiatric Hospital near Dorchester. She died there
on 13 May 1947.
Catalogue
7.
8,
9.
10,
11.
12,
13,
Frances Hodgkins (left)
with Annie Coggan,
Bradford-on- Tone,
Somerset.
1.
2.
3.
Boy in the Wood (c.1929)
Pencil
Collection: Robert McDougall Art Gallery
Fish(c.1931)
Watercolour
Collection: British Council
Sabrina's Garden (1932)
Pencil
Collection: Robert McDougall Art Gallery
ISBN 0-908874-31-6
4.
5.
6.
Drawing with Landscape (c.1932)
Pencil
Collection: British Council
Flowers in a Vase (c.1932)
Watercolou'r
Collection: British Government Art Collection
Still Life, Fishes and Shells (c.1933)
Watercolour
Collection: British Council
14.
15.
16
17.
18
Still Life with Red Jar (c.1933)
Watercolour
Collection: Robert McDougall Art Gallery
Spanish Still Life and Landscape (c.1933j34)
Oil on canvas
Collection: Robert McDougall Art Gallery
Youth (c.1934j35)
Pencil
Collection: British Council
The Return of the River (Tossa de Mar) (c.1936)
Gouache
Collection: Robert McDougall Art Gallery
Tanks, Barrels and Drums (c.193 7)
Oi I on ca nvas
Collection: British Government Art Collection
Arrangement ofJugs (1938)
Lithograph
Collection: British Council
Houses and Outhouses Purbeck (c.1938)
Oi I on ca nvas
Collection: British Council
Spanish Pottery (c.1939)
Watercolou r
Collection: British Council
Primulus (c.1940)
Pencil
Collection: British Council
Farmyard (c.1940)
Gouache
Collection: Robert McDougall Art qallery
Still Life - lipp (1945)
,
Oil on canvas
i
Collection: Robert McDougall Art Gallery
To the Castle Corfe(c.1946)
•
Gouache
'
Collection: Robert McDougall Art Gallery
r
'.